A dozen college presidents and other top officials and professors serve on the boards of some of the biggest student-loan companies, Bloomberg reported today. The news agency’s article, which is based largely on the companies’ filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, suggests that such service — richly remunerated by the lenders — could be considered a conflict of interest for the college officials. The officials deny that they played any role in helping the companies get listed as preferred lenders on their campuses, an allegation at the heart of the current controversy. Most of them also note that their board service passed muster with campus ethics codes.

The lengthy article provides exhaustive detail on the nature of the board service, but it does not cite smoking-gun evidence of any of the officials’ manipulating his or her college’s student-loan practices to benefit a lender, perhaps because none of these top-level officials are generally close enough to the decision-making in the financial-aid office. Still, at a time when federal and state investigators are turning up daily signs of an exceptionally cozy relationship between lenders and some student-aid officials, a relationship of any kind — however apparently benign — may be a bad idea. —Andrew Mytelka